The North Carolina–based artist talks about his process of mapping race, memory, and the hidden depths of his multilayered paintings.

The Draft, 2002, tar paper, cattle ear tag, basketball rim, and acrylic paint, 44.5 × 24.38 inches each. Courtesy of the artist.

The work of North Carolina–based artist Juan Logan inhabits a space between conceptual abstraction, installation art, and symbolic figuration. A seasoned compositionist, Logan draws from a distinct Southern past informed by familial, regional, and post-Diasporic African American practices and culture. A disciplined practitioner of the aesthetic faith, Logan’s work is his voice, and that voice always draws attention to and investigates pertinent topics about race and culture, religion and spiritual practice.

Through symbolic narratives, Logan makes us stop to think about Black presence. American Blackness is a codified state of being. A large percentage of our population must “code-switch” just to walk a straight line through that crooked American promise of freedom. Abstraction is a codified language of elements. In Logan’s stunning compositions, the elements have a self-assigned duality. They can be read one way but they can also shift as necessary—like our people—to speak the truth about ourselves, our perspectives, and the genetic, mystical, and ancestral legacies that continue to charge our paths forward.

Elegy CXIV, 2021, acrylic paint on hot press paper, 22.13 × 30.38 inches. Photos by Mitchell Kearney. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Kremers, Berlin, Germany, unless otherwise noted.

Elegy LXXII, 2020, acrylic paint on Waterford hot press paper, 30 × 39 inches. Photos by Mitchell Kearney.

Elegy XV, 2017, acrylic paint on canvas, 36 × 48 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Schmidt/Dean Gallery, Cherry Hill, NC.

Elegy CVIII, 2021, acrylic paint on hot press paper, 36 × 48 inches.

Elegy CIV, 2021, acrylic paint on hot press paper, 22 × 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist

Berrisford Boothe: When did you begin making art?

Juan Logan: I made my first sculpture about sixty-two years ago. Since that time, I’ve been working in bronze, steel, and granite, and I’ve also produced several thousand paintings.

BB: He says casually, “several thousand paintings.” (laughter)

JL: I work a lot. It allows me to explore something in depth over an extended period of time rather than thinking of getting through something. I’ve never been in a hurry to finish a piece; I am interested in giving it the time that it needs to mature.

BB: If you’ll forgive me, that’s almost comical considering how prolific you are. (laughter) You’re saying that you are very patient, as I know you are—and you wait for these things to come to you. But in our last conversation, you showed me a table with hundreds of works that no one had seen yet. And they all seemed to have had your full attention.

JL: They did. Because I work every day, I’m able to do that. I only stop to eat and drink; otherwise I spend my time considering what needs to happen next in my work.

BB: You said you made your first sculpture six decades ago. Do you remember what inspired it? Was it something that happened politically or culturally in terms of race? What was the accelerant?

JL: The accelerant was a man by the name of Harold McLean who was my high school woodshop teacher. I carved an eagle with a five-foot wingspan out of white pine—he had encouraged me to develop my own personal iconography and vocabulary to make that piece. That became a jumping-off point for my first paintings.

BB: A significant portion of the work you’ve done over the last few decades also ventures into three-dimensional collage, sculpture, and installations. You’re not an artist that allows us to tick a box. Although I see a few things through association—for instance with Fred Wilson’s work, or some of your objects speak to Betye Saar—you have a distinct voice. What is the prism of your work?

JL: My work is based on my history, my background, my family—even the house I live in is 120 years old. So my work is tied to this land and the many things that my family participated in.

BB: A sense of ancestral legacy.

JL: Knowing and understanding that legacy and, more importantly, being a part of it, is what informs my work. I grew up on the land we farmed, the river where we fished, and we raised or grew most of our food here. There’s always more to tell, but my grandfather often said, “Tell some, save some.”

BB: So that legacy was imprinted on you as something you lived rather than something that you gained access to through an education or institutions.

JL: Exactly. It’s not something I read about. (laughter) It was a lived experience.

BB: And part of that lived experience was the presence of mysticism?

JL: Absolutely. There were members of my family who worked roots—they used herbs, roots, and other things to protect, or to bring about change. I produced many paintings in the ’80s referencing those practices—for example, soothsayers and their ability to foresee the future, the shaman who could divine the hidden, or the use of a talisman, which is a charm that never fails. I believe that the artists of today are in a way the shamans of our time—we do have the ability to show things that otherwise would not be seen. It’s important that we can do that. It’s what we do.

BB: What do you mean, “It’s what we do”?

JL: We show people things that they would not see on their own. Many people don’t have the vision or the ability to see. They need a person leading them down the appropriate path, rather than just any path. Someone with vision and an understanding of where they are. Spiritual leaders do that for us in many respects. And I’m not talking about the church, necessarily. There are many kinds of spiritual leaders.

BB: Artists can provide us with the opportunity to reexamine how we see, and what is important in what’s being seen.

JL: Right. Nothing can be taken for granted. For every assumption, the necessity of that assumption must be established first. So, unless it’s truly necessary to assume something, the artist doesn’t have to. Nor is it necessary for you to have all the answers. That’s not how we exist in this world. There are others who know more, who understand more, who have deeper feelings about the things that you want to know about. And the most important thing that we can do is to seek them out.

By Any Other Name, 2003, wood tin, steel, and brazil nuts, 60 × 48 × 9 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

BB: Hmm. Before we move on, I want to poke my finger in a wound for a minute. In the catalog essay accompanying your exhibition Juan Logan: Creating and Collecting at the Sordoni Art Gallery in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania—

JL: The show actually originated at the Hickory Museum of Art in North Carolina. But then it traveled to the Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre.

BB: I see. The essay talks about the “magic of abstraction.” I remember reading that, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up a little bit. Largely because a cultural trope like the “magical negro,” you know, is not born out of appreciation. We co-opted these terms so that we could expand and redefine them.

I was uncomfortable with that statement—nothing against the author—because “magic of abstraction” reduced your work to something unknowable. Instead of something disciplined. Conjuring is fine with me, but magic doesn’t sit well. Magic commonly refers to a kind of illusory manipulation, a sleight of hand. But what we’re talking about is the ability to be an alchemist, to do an elemental restructuring.

JL: I agree with you. I think artists create spaces. We hide things, because we develop surfaces that have very many layers of paint, thus creating many layers of meaning. When I look at certain figurative works where everything is on the surface, I sometimes find it hard to get beyond that.

Many of my old paintings had eighty to a hundred layers of paint on them. They gained physical weight because of that layering, but it was necessary, because I only wanted portions of what I put underneath to show through. There was a painting I did in the early ’90s, called First you have to believe, where I was looking at different forms of religion. I included different symbols and icons on the face or surface of this piece, which tied directly back to various religious practices. But then I produced another painting where I put all those same elements in it, and then I covered them all up. I said, “This is where I live most of the time, because this is what faith is: things unseen and believing anyway.” So, I think through abstraction we’re able to build in those various layers of meaning. Those are not necessarily layers for the viewer to absorb. I’m using the layers so I can understand more about what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.

BB: So, in this sense “magic” becomes the forces both invisible and visible. And most importantly, the invisible forces underneath the visible forces give it potency—

JL: Those are the things that drive the work. And those invisible layers are more powerful than me simply putting everything on the surface for you to see at first glance.

BB: I just read Jack Whitten’s Notes from the Woodshed and there’s a line, I quote: “All of these years, I’ve been trying to show what’s beneath the ice.” Is that what you mean?

JL: It is! I can only give you access to bits and pieces of what’s beneath the ice. I’ve been working on a series called Elegies for a few years. It’s a serious reflection on memory and the loss of it, or the absence and fragmentation of it. In these works, I could never show you everything—either because I don’t remember it all myself, or because I don’t have all the information. Therefore, I can only represent it in bits and pieces. Because of that, many times in the process of making a memory visible, things get buried and occasionally are lost.

BB: I know there are developments in neuroscience that show that every time we remember something, it’s akin to opening a drawer. And every time we open the drawer, we contaminate that memory. I find that very interesting. We affect the memory, making it less accurate, and then that becomes the new memory until we open the drawer again, and we change it—again. That’s a beautiful, relational metaphor to making art, isn’t it? Because as you create a series of layers, each layer wants to say to you: this is the one.

JL: Right, this is it!

BB: And you have to have faith in things unseen when you add new lines or layers. But as you do that, you’re adversely affecting the memory you just created, aren’t you?

JL: Well, you know, even though you’re looking at the same thing, you’re remembering different aspects about it. For me, an event is never expressed as one singular thing. Whatever I was looking at while I was out and about, changes once I get to the studio or home; I cannot recall all the details. I only put down what I remember and that changes.

BB: You take a fraction of whatever that input was, and that becomes the staging for further investigation.

JL: Exactly. It’s why we often go back to a site, trying to access memories, or we wake up in the middle of the night remembering something, and we jot it down because we will in all likelihood forget it if we don’t.

Mark Haven Beach, 2010, acrylic paint, puzzle pieces, and wallpaper, 48 × 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist and the Tweed Museum of Art, Duluth, Minnesota.

Sugar House, 2011, acrylic paint, puzzle pieces, glitter, and lottery tickets on canvas, 72 × 192 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

BB: We’ve wandered off into psychology. I want to hear about the continuum between experience, translation, application, reiteration—all that is creating your particular vision. Usually, folks are left with the final statement, as opposed to your layers of statements.

JL: Years ago, I did a show called Effective Sight. Because it’s never enough to simply see something if you don’t understand what you’re looking at. So “effective sight” is that ability to see with understanding. More times than not, the access is there, but it’s important to understand exactly what it is you’re looking at, and how you can interrogate and investigate to get beyond those surface layers.

BB: You’re creating these elegant and dynamic relationships as abstractions that have illusory or metaphorical relationships to other things. Abstraction is very much hip-hop, you know? It’s multiple things, polyrhythms, everything’s happening at once. I don’t think people really understand the degree to which we have to become comfortable with our psyche. And that becomes a catalyst for curating symbols that can also create language.

JL: I agree. All the things that happen are happening at once. While this is going on over here, this other thing is also happening at the same time. And while this was happening, this is also happening. And all those temporal and spatial layers get built into the piece—sometimes only as fragments, but other times they are expressed in a very complete manner, recalling almost everything. I believe every element is important.

BB: It’s most important to be able to facilitate the myriad of vibrating elements that are in motion.

I’m interested in your response to one of my favorite terms by Stephen Nachmanovitch. In his book Free Play, he talks about play as a fundamental aspect of serious art-making. When we hear play, we might think of something juvenile, not belonging to the adult intellectual pantheon. But the truth is, your work is incredibly playful. How do you establish the relationship between the seriousness of the message, and your exuberance and playfulness?

JL: I’m glad you say that because people often feel that my topics tend to be heavy. But my life is a very joyful one. I can’t imagine feeling sad; it happens of course, but not often. I feel blessed every day to be here in the studio, being able to play, being free to try things out. I don’t mind paintings or sculptures failing, you see. I have produced lots of things and some just didn’t work out. Those are the things I’ve often gone back to, when I’ve figured out exactly what I needed to do to make something right. Fortunately, my studio is big enough to keep works up on the walls and floors and still have plenty of space left.

BB: What happens when you leave your work out?

JL: It gives me the chance to reconsider it and maybe try something different with it. A painting might evolve into something more meaningful. And that’s the best part.

BB: I want to talk more about the iterative nature of creating. I’m not sure a lot of people understand how important it is to allow the work to speak back to you, to give you directives about what should be done.

JL: Exactly, and that’s a function of time. There is often a misconception that once we make a piece we understand it. The “speaking back” happens more with my larger works. They take a while—sometimes months—and that gives me the opportunity to find out if a piece is truly working. And if it’s not, it’s okay.

BB: But is it though?

BB: Yeah, I didn’t think so. Let’s talk about your materials.

JL: Materials matter, they inform what I’m trying to say. Whether I’m working with ductile iron, or steel, or acrylic paint, or puzzle pieces, or handmade paper, I select the materials to help me move an idea forward.

BB: Materials give the most forceful voice to a concept—

JL: And sometimes it’s even the absence of a concept.

BB: Amen. Part of your repertoire of materials are a set of icons, or symbols, and a set of processes you employ and continually use to find a new pitch. Can you tell us about some of these forms that are elemental parts of your language? The head, the boat, the puzzle pieces . . .

JL: In 1967, I made a painting titled I Am Black; it was the first time I used a single head to speak of my existence, my space in our American culture. During those years, I wanted to be absolutely sure everyone knew exactly how I saw myself. That head shape represented me, my ideas, and who I am as a Black man. Later, in 1971, as we were moving forward with the civil rights movement, I made Approved, a painting that spoke to what was needed to be truly accepted into this American culture. Realizing, of course, that I had little, if any, control over the process of being accepted.

Over the years, I’ve produced many paintings that made use of the head form. From 1996 through 2006, I made hundreds of head-shaped sculptures, some out of wood and steel, others out of polyurethane resin, and still others of polyester fiber. All these works addressed issues of identity and recognition. There were also all my drawings. The head morphed from being my own head shape, to the silhouette of Aunt Jemima, and then finally to represent a more universal head of humanity.

BB: So the head became a codified form for an ever-expanding meaning.

JL: Yes, you could say that. The paintings in my series Leisure Space included this universal head that became part of a mapping process. I appreciated how Andrew Kahrl wrote about this series in his essay “Pleasure and Power.” I will read it to you: The formal elements of these works speak to Logan’s conceptualization of the relationship between race and space. The head motif, a signature element in Logan’s body of work, morphs into and becomes land and water masses, suggesting how the ways we interact with, seek to mold, and interpret natural and built environments are shaped by what the social theorist George Lipsitz calls the “spatial imaginary of whiteness and Blackness.” How we view physical landscapes—indeed, our very understanding of ideal and degraded environments—is shaped by the structured advantages we derive from, or experience through, them.

This process of mapping our spatial human relations has carried me forward into the paintings and drawings I am producing today as part of the Elegy series.

BB: The Elegy series is visually very compelling. Each piece seems to have a codified structure and color combination.

JL: The Elegy paintings are about memory and the loss of it. They explore our inability to retain the details of our daily life experiences, particularly those we deem as important. It’s almost as though we are existing in two worlds: today, and everyplace else—from yesterday and the day before and the day before that—and remembering less and less as we move forward. I paint the fragments of what remains of those memories—a color, a form, a person, but rarely the face. I paint these for myself, but even more often for people who share with me fragments of their memories of what was once a full life. For example, this one, Elegy XV, uses the colors blue, white, and maroon, which are the colors of our federal prison uniforms. I’m considering someone who’s been locked away for more than a decade, and their memories are tied back to fifteen years ago and earlier. Their memories are floating on that boat, away from them. The longer they are incarcerated, the fewer memories they will be able to grasp and hold on to.

BB: As we said earlier, memories can be corrupted, but they also define us. Tell me about Elegy CIV.

JL: I was playing with the notion of a cradle and holding on to everything that’s in it.

BB: Elegy CVIII looks like it could barely contain its own energy.

JL: I know. (laughter) Working on it, I felt like I didn’t want to stop making those marks, and I thought, This is getting good. But because I’m looking at all my memories at once, they are all important, or they seemed so at the time.

BB: Many people might not understand the complexity of the information they receive. And someone else might say, “Oh, it’s too much. It’s too Black.” (laughter) But those same people go through their lives driving down any interstate, or watching four hundred channels that bombard them with images far beyond what an artist can produce. It’s the ball and chain of being an artist of color: we’re constantly asked to tone it down, to make it simpler, to not be so loud . . .

JL: Absolutely. It’s interesting to consider what you are saying. I remember curators who visited my studio years ago telling me that my abstract work wasn’t Black enough, or angry enough. They wanted work that they felt truly reflected Black culture. What’s funny is that having experienced that for a number of years, I decided to produce a series of paintings with large, hooded figures. Of course, I was then told that they were too angry and too aggressive. (laughter)

BB: Tell me about The Draft, an installation from 2002.

JL: The Draft is about kids who get tagged early in life and later get drafted by the NBA. I cut silhouettes of heads of Black boys from tar paper that are three feet tall, and they each have a basketball rim above their heads which casts a shadow that becomes a halo. You see, we expect these kids to be our saviors. They are often expected to save the coach, the school, the family, but rarely themselves.

BB: There are six black heads and six basketball hoops. The heads have these tags on them.

JL: I tagged them with cattle ear tags. Ten-year-olds are being tagged, because they can jump high or run fast or handle the ball really well. And at the end of the day, they are bought and sold.

BB: LeBron James was tagged when he was about nine or ten.

JL: Right. That is the nature of it.

BB: The metaphor of the shadow the hoop is casting on the kids also made me aware of a darker, more sinister aspect. The hoop becomes the noose. It also made me think of David Hammons’s magnificent basketball chandelier sculptures. I had never thought of the basketball hoop as being the right height to lynch us. As artists, we are having these conversations with ourselves and employing objects a certain way that, as you have done, can pull in new meaning. The hole you’re digging is way deeper than it seems, isn’t it?

BB: The NCAA is making billions of dollars off young men of color playing on the fields where their great-grandparents had to work for free. Which reminds me of Hank Willis Thomas’s conceptual photograph The Cotton Bowl (2011), where he had young Black football players on the same field down South where their ancestors labored as enslaved people. It’s remarkably disturbing.

Let’s talk about some of the other recurring symbols in your work, like the clouds and the boats.

JL: All of my clouds are made up of heads. I also use boats loaded with clouds because I often think of people who are traveling to find better places. The clouds stand for our hopes, dreams, and aspirations.

In Elegy LVII, from 2019, I expanded the use of the head form. If you get close enough to the painting, you realize you’re looking at the heads of 5,700 individual people. Of course, the average viewer would never know that, but there are those who would take the time to count. The painting represents some of the children that were being held on our southern US border.

I’ll Save You Tomorrow, 2014, acrylic paint, wood, beaded fabric, aluminum, archival digital print, and glitter on canvas and birch panel, 60 × 132 inches. Courtesy of the artist and the Hickory Museum of Art, North Carolina.

BB: One of my favorite paintings of yours is I’ll Save You Tomorrow (2014). I recall you saying that you upcycled acrylic paint from your palettes, overlaying them and creating a very dense, emotional, and, for lack of a better word, “crazy” quilt of peeled-off paint. Painted lifesaver rings and heads were buried in them—

BB: Right. Human beings trying to find a better place to live, but ultimately, finding themselves trapped in a culture that says, “We recognize your suffering, but we can’t get to you now.”

JL: Which is why there’s a bead-encrusted red cross on the left of the painting. In times of human crisis our legislators will almost always say, “We need to pray for those people.” Well, they don’t need your prayers, they can pray for themselves. What they need is actual help. We’ve all experienced “I’ll save you tomorrow” in one way or another, even when we call that friend and they say, “Listen, I’d love to help you, but I just can’t do it today. Can I help you tomorrow?”

BB: Truth. Let’s talk about the puzzle pieces in your work. You’re using the backs of the puzzle pieces, with their tonal variations perhaps representing skin tone.

JL: Exactly. The backs of the puzzles are brown, tan, and all these other colors. When Hurricane Katrina happened, the city of New Orleans was like this huge puzzle which had been taken apart and could never be put back together again. So, in Help Me, Save Me, Love Me (2009), which is five by sixteen feet, there are thousands of puzzle pieces representing flooded people. In the work, you see people migrating around the Red Cross, which also represents FEMA and the Superdome—all the places and organizations that were supposed to help people, but actually abandoned them.

BB: The people didn’t fit anymore in the puzzle.

JL: Exactly. Along with all the people who didn’t make it. For them I used a Matisse color called Ghost Gum.

BB: Oh my god, yes. The color speaks to the tragedy of the situation. It was not only an indictment of the country and the government, but a real-time wake-up call regarding the disregard for Black and Brown lives.

JL: What initially inspired that piece was an aerial shot I saw of people waiting outside the Superdome, trying to get inside. You couldn’t discern any individuals, only the colors of their clothing and the things they carried with them. When I enlarged the photo, it pixelated into what looked like puzzle pieces. I’ve continued using puzzle pieces when needed because of the anonymity they provide. It’s a way to talk about all of us Black and Brown people being in the same boat, impacted by the same unreasonable rules, regulations, and policies.

In one of my earlier installations, Unseen (2001), I used wax heads to represent the Black employees who were ninety percent of the workforce at a mill that got closed down. When the public viewed the piece, at first glance they failed to see any of the heads. The same thing used to occur with the workers. Most people only saw their bodies, rarely their faces.

BB: Heads that become clouds, boats, puzzle pieces, vectors, perforated lines, networks or constellations made of lines, and wallpaper grids . . . you have an exemplary ability to orchestrate these many elements into compelling compositions. You use a recurring set of elements as symbols to speak to important themes and tropes within the culture. But art should also be beautiful, and that’s important to you, isn’t it?

JL: Absolutely. Mark Haven Beach (2010), from the series Leisure Space, is another work that combines several of my elements: clouds, heads, puzzle pieces. It talks about one of our designated spaces of leisure in Virginia.

BB: Sugar House (2011) is another work by you that holds an enormous amount of information. It could fail in communicating that, and somehow it doesn’t. It’s a masterful and very charged composition.

JL: It does cover a lot of ground. Sugar House examines how the implementation of certain regulations and policies impact Black and Brown people more negatively than others. It looks at the last housing debacle, and certain aspects of the medical industry, and investigates issues of access and the lack thereof. It also reflects on how people of color are often required to accept many more obstacles than whites in their effort to move forward in our American culture.

Berrisford Boothe is an artist and former professor of art. His writing includes essays on artists Tokie Rome-Taylor, Arvie Smith, and Amoako Boafo. Until 2020, Boothe was the founding curator for The Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, where he collected over 430 works. Most recently he coproduced the 2019–2020 Wadsworth Atheneum exhibition, Afrocosmologies: American Visions.

A look inside the artwork on our Summer 2022 issue.

Some images in life and art remain seared in one’s memory because of their sublime effect and power. Such images are found and masterfully constructed in the films of Cauleen Smith.

"I’m trying to find out what my relationship to the body is, the comfort and discomfort, the appropriate and the inappropriate."

BOMB’s summer issue features two interviews with artists at the Whitney Biennial: Trinh T. Minh-ha discusses urban supremacy and her new film What About China?, and Emily Barker shares their experience with disability and healthcare through art—and curse words. Also, Sharon Van Etten rues how the universe called her bluff when she wanted to work from home, Victoria Chang considers the differences between being visible and being seen, and William Wegman revisits his early days as a conceptual artist. Plus, the launch of a poetry series, an excerpt from Lynne Tillman’s latest book, and a short story by Alejandro Zambra.

We need our own space to think and digest what we see. And we also have to trust the viewer and trust the power of the object. And the power is in simple things. I like the kind of clarity that that brings to thought. It keeps thought from being opaque.

BOMB Magazine has been publishing conversations between artists of all disciplines since 1981. BOMB’s founders—New York City artists and writers—decided to publish dialogues that reflected the way practitioners spoke about their work among themselves. Today, BOMB is a nonprofit, multi-platform publishing house that creates, disseminates, and preserves artist-generated content from interviews to artists’ essays to new literature. BOMB includes a quarterly print magazine, a daily online publication, and a digital archive of its previously published content from 1981 onward.

Annually, BOMB serves 1.5 million online readers––44% of whom are under 30 years of age––through its free and searchable archive and BOMB Daily, a virtual hub where a diverse cohort of artists and writers explore the creative process within a community of their peers and mentors. BOMB's Oral History Project is dedicated to collecting, documenting, and preserving the stories of distinguished visual artists of the African Diaspora.

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